Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation.

Children interpreted an utterance made by a protagonist with a false belief, such as, 'I would like the car in the garage.' Calculating the speaker's belief in conjunction with the literal meaning of the utterance would lead to the correct interpretation that the intended referent is the car on the track, given that the car in the garage swapped places with the one on the track. In Experiments 1 and 2, many children aged around 4 and 5 years wrongly indicated the car in the garage. In contrast, many correctly indicated the car on the track when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief because the utterance was, 'the car I put in the garage'. Six-year-olds found both kinds of utterance equally easy in Experiment 1, while 3-year-olds had equal difficulty with both. In Experiments 2 and 3, the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance and many children aged between 3 and 6 years successfully used information about the speaker's belief to identify which of several candidate referents was intended. We discuss the results in relation to characteristics of utterance comprehension and consider implications for developments in understanding the mind by children beyond 4 years.     

Pathways to Risk Among Inner-City African-American Adolescent Females: The Influence of Gang Membership

Differential rates of participation in three categories of risk behaviors (i.e., sexual activity, substance use, violence) were explored, comparing gang members to nonmembers, within a sample of 1,143 inner-city African American adolescent females. The relationship between gang membership and risk behavior also was examined, by exploring the association between a variety of microsystemic influences (e.g., gang, family, school) and participation in risk behaviors. MANOVA analyses indicated that gang members, relative to nonmembers, reported higher rates of participation in each of the three categories of risk behaviors. Stepwise linear regression analyses indicated that gang membership was the variable with the most consistent predictive ability, across all categories of risk, as it entered early in all equations and remained in all three final models after controlling for other statistically significant contextual variables. Findings suggest that intervention efforts aimed at reducing adolescent females' participation in sexual activity, substance use, and violence should consider the influence of gang membership on the participation in these behaviors.     

Moral principles as moral dispositions

What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular truths about what is morally permissible, impermissible, etc. Moreover, they can do other things that moral principles are supposed to do: explain the phenomena “falling within their scope,” support counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. And they are apt to be the truthmakers for moral laws, or “lawlike” moral generalizations.     

How personality relates to intelligence test performance: Implications for a theory of intelligence,ageing research and personality assessment

Previously reported findings indicate that variation of EEG evoked potential parameters is strongly related to both personality and intelligence differences (Robinson, 1982a, b). These data and the associated theory imply that personality should relate to intelligence test performance. Results are described in this report which indicate that subtest profiles obtained with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) differ significantly for Ss scoring highest and lowest on the Extraversion (E) scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ); introverts tend to do better on the ‘Verbal’ subtests while extraverts tend to do better on the ‘Performance’ measures. Ss with middling scores on the E scale of the EPQ can also be distinguished in terms of specific WAIS profiles. In this case the results define two contrasting groups. Young male Ss with middling E scores tend to have high Psychoticism (P) and low Lie (L) scores on the EPQ as well as having distinctive WAIS profiles characterized by higher scores on subtests normally associated with a ‘Memory’ or ‘Attention-Concentration’ factor. Higher scores were also obtained by this subgroup on the Picture Arrangement and Block Design subtests which were previously shown to load a P + /L ? factor. The converse is true for older female Ss who also have middling E scores. As well as demonstrating a systematic relationship between personality and intelligence test performance these data provide some further support for a model of brain-behaviour relationships proposed by Robinson. Within this theoretical framework a neurophysiologically meaningful explanation can be provided for the three major factors that reliably emerge in factor-analytic studies of the WAIS. From an applied viewpoint, the data indicate that personality differences can be assessed from performance on tests such as the WAIS. On this issue the results are discussed with particular reference to Gittinger's Personality Assessment System. Implications for ageing research are also discussed.     

When being right is not enough: four-year-olds distinguish knowledgeable informants from merely accurate informants

Recent evidence demonstrates that children are selective in their social learning, preferring to learn from a previously accurate speaker than from a previously inaccurate one. We examined whether children assessing speakers' reliability take into account how speakers achieved their prior accuracy. In Study 1, when faced with two accurate informants, 4- and 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) were more likely to seek novel information from an informant who had previously given the answers unaided than from an informant who had always relied on help from a third party. Similarly, in Study 2, 4-year-olds were more likely to trust the testimony of an unaided informant over the testimony provided by an assisted informant. Our results indicate that when children reach around 4 years of age, their selective trust extends beyond simple generalizations based on informants' past accuracy to a more sophisticated selectivity that distinguishes between truly knowledgeable informants and merely accurate informants who may not be reliable in the long term.